I've been a science fiction fan since I was a kid reading Jules Verne. I don't read a lot of it but lately I've been focusing on getting away from politics and into the future. Kim Stanley Robinson is on of my favorites. It took me a year to read the Mars Trilogy. What's interesting about Robinson is he deals with the realm of possibilities.
Ministry of the Future, while overlong and tedious at times, dealt with the horrors of climate change, echo-terrorism, which actually had a major impact, and almost every solution for global warming being tried, and often succeeding.
Many also called its portrayal of the climate crisis—and of human society on the verge of collapse—prescient. Three years after its release, and mere weeks after scientists declared June of 2023 the hottest June on record, the accuracy with which Robinson’s predictions are coming true utterly terrifies....despite the horrors its protagonists face, the novel is quite optimistic: humans come to value collaboration, mitigation, and adaptation over greed and selfishness. But to get to that point, we first must go through hell.
There's always hope in his stories. In New York 2140, the seas have risen and Manhattan looks like Venice and high tides bring the ocean up to mid-Brooklyn. And Rockaway no longer exists. I could imagine the remnants of my house under water. But the city functions - sort of.
In today's NYT there are articles on all the nations sending stuff to the moon. The article mentions that only China has a good success rate. I just finished reading Red Moon written in 2015. And here he posits China as by far the most advanced nation on the moon, with a massive base on the South Pole. The United States is far behind but with its focus on the North Pole. Everything is real in the sense of it all looks possible. Robotic bulldozers have created space for very livable communities. And getting back and forth uses rocket sleds.
There are 3 key characters, 30 somethings American tech nerd named Fred, Qi, a Chinese princelingess as privileged daughter of a Politburo member, and a much older Ta Shu, a famous Chinese media/philosopher/poet who brokers much of the action. Qi is the major force, leading an underground movement in China to overthrow the Party. Ta Shu, while critical of the Party, also fears its demise. His view is that the so-called two party system in the US is not much different in actuality from the one party system in China - the book is from 2015 when that had more elements of truth than today.
Spoiler alert - in the end there are simultaneous revolutions from beneath in the US and China with the hope that there will be some unity between the masses in both countries. A dream for sure.
Here are some links and segments from reviews, many of which were critical of the wordiness of the book.
